by Dan Wells
I hesitated, not because of the question itself, but the way she phrased it. This was more than just asking me if I was certain. She was worried about something, and I knew Ostler well enough to know that she was never worried by abstract concepts. Something new had happened.
I walked toward the street. “What’s wrong?”
“Get Nathan and Trujillo,” she said, “and come to the police station. There’s been another killing.”
A dozen questions flooded my mind, but I focused on the one that concerned me most. “That would leave Brooke alone.”
“She’s in the secure wing of a dementia facility, surrounded by trained personnel.”
“Medical personnel,” I said, stopping on a windswept corner of the intersection. “If the Withered come for her, they’ll be no help at all.”
Ostler let out a long, slow breath. “After what I’ve seen today, none of us would be any help. If you swear Elijah’s not hunting us—”
“You asked if I’d bet my life on it,” I said. “Betting Brooke’s is different.”
“I’m asking you to examine a corpse,” said Ostler. “Cut the pretense and get down here; you’re wasting time.”
She hung up, and I stood on the corner, staring at the flurries of fallen snow the wind picked up and swirled across the asphalt. I didn’t want to leave Brooke, but Ostler was right. The chance to examine a body was something I’d been waiting for ever since I’d joined this team. I could complain and argue and stall as long I wanted, but eventually I’d go. I wanted to stay away on purpose, obstinately, for that reason alone, but I couldn’t. My feet were already crossing the street, as far beyond my control as Brooke’s hand, writing invisible notes to no one on her bedspread.
* * *
“His name is Stephen Applebaum,” said Ostler, “and somebody must have really been mad at him.” Our whole team, minus Potash, was gathered in a pale-blue room in the morgue, looking down at a metal table containing a man-shaped thing under a sheet. The police had stepped out, giving us a moment of privacy. The once-sterile sheet was caked here and there with dark brown bloodstains. It was all I could do not to reach out and touch one. “Forty-two years old, Caucasian male, found in the Dumpster behind the Riverwalk Motel. They offer both nightly and hourly rates, so you know it’s classy. His clothing was with him, though most of it wasn’t on him at the time.”
“Sexual assault?” asked Trujillo.
“Nothing that simple,” said Ostler, and she grabbed the edge of the sheet. “We think the clothing was removed because it made it easier to do this.” She pulled back the sheet and the others gasped. I leaned forward, fascinated by the carnage. The body was pocked with holes—not stab wounds, but shallow gashes, a couple of inches wide and some of them up to two inches deep. They were mostly bloodless, as was typical for a body already cleaned and examined by a forensics team, so instead of red the wounds were brown and purple. Bruises and rotting meat. They covered the corpse like nightmare polka dots.
I was home.
“What?…” said Nathan, trying and failing to form a cogent question.
I pulled on a pair of latex gloves and prodded the nearest wound, feeling the ragged edge of skin around its rim. I’d grown up in a mortuary, spying on my parents as a child, watching them work on corpses through the crack in the door, and as I’d grown older they’d started giving me little jobs to do: bring me a drink; hand me that cleanser; hold this just for a second. By the time I was a teenager I was working full time as an apprentice embalmer, and there were few things I loved more in the entire world. Now that Marci was dead, maybe there was nothing.
“What could have done this?” asked Trujillo, apparently more inured to the sight of death than Nathan was.
“Teeth,” said Diana. She’d been with Ostler all morning and had apparently already been briefed. I ran my finger gently along a pair of sharp ridges jutting up from the muscle tissue, imagining a row of teeth making just such a mark. It made sense, and I nodded while Diana continued. “It took the local forensics guy a while to figure it out,because the bite marks are obvious but the bite shapes are all wrong. They get dog and coyote attacks in this area every now and then, but those leave a longer wound because that’s how a canine muzzle is shaped.” She made a puppet-like motion with her hand, chomping at the air. “These bites are wider and shallower.”
“A bear?” asked Nathan.
“Human,” I said. “Look at this pattern of tracks.” I pointed to the ridges I’d been studying and bared my teeth, clacking them together to demonstrate. I pointed at each ridge in the flesh. “There’s the incisors—a bigger one, then a smaller one—and then a deeper track on the side for the canine. Those are exactly the tracks a human mouth would make biting through the meat.”
“It’s disturbing that you know that,” said Nathan.
I shrugged. “One of many reasons I’m a vegetarian.”
Ostler looked at me. “Have you encountered anything like this before?”
“Forman left bite marks in some of his torture victims,” I said, shaking my head, “but they barely broke the skin. Whoever did this was after the meat.” I probed one of the deeper wounds on the body, a large chunk missing from the outer thigh. The attacker had taken several bites from the area, digging in and ripping off flesh until the bone itself was exposed. The surrounding muscle hung into the wound in ragged, ropy strands.
As violent as the attack had been, I felt a kind of stately reverence for the body. The cannibal had attacked, the victim had fought back, flesh had ripped away in a bloody spray, but that was all done now, and we were looking at a pale, bloodless effigy. It was like a marble statue, carved in commemoration of an ancient battle. I raised a clean finger and smoothed its hair, doing my part to honor the dead.
“Why wasn’t his face damaged?” asked Trujillo.
I frowned, and looked at the body’s face. It was completely free of the wounds that covered the rest of it; in fact the whole head seemed practically untouched. Why hadn’t I noticed that before?
“There’s not a lot of meat on a face,” said Nathan.
“You’ve never eaten sheep in Afghanistan,” said Diana.
“Meaty or not,” said Trujillo, “the face is a prime target for a cannibalistic assault. Lunge at a person and what does your own face contact first? People reflect each other; our arms grab theirs, our face meets theirs.”
“But cannibals don’t attack people face to face like that,” I said. If he wanted to play serial-killer trivia I could give him a run for his money. “Human cannibal attacks are premeditated and careful, like Jeffrey Dahmer or Armin Meiwes. They carve up the body almost like a—dammit.” Trujillo was right. As soon as I started talking about the classic cases, I realized what Trujillo already had: that this one didn’t fit the pattern. “Most cannibals carve up the body like a butcher,” I said. “They incapacitate the victim, take it home, store the parts.… This guy didn’t do any of that.”
“Even without knowing the details of the initial attack,” said Trujillo, “the body makes what happened after that fairly obvious. Our killer fed on the victim soon, perhaps immediately, ripping out bites like a feral predator. He took time to remove some of the clothes, but that appears to be the only humanlike behavior; the rest is very animalistic. When he was full, or at least sated, he hid the body in a Dumpster—he didn’t save it for later and he didn’t even carve off a piece. All the wounds are caused by teeth, and if they weren’t human teeth, this would have virtually no hallmarks of a human attack.”
“What about the face?” asked Ostler. “You started this whole topic by mentioning the face.”
“Because that’s the part that doesn’t fit,” I said. Now that I saw what Trujillo was talking about, I could tell exactly what he was thinking. “The nature of this attack suggests—though again, we don’t know for sure—that it was a face-to-face assault, possibly with bare hands. Serial killers who treat dead bodies this wildly tend to attack living ones with the same a
ttitude. But this one didn’t.” I turned back to the corpse, picking up the right hand and searching it for marks. “Not only would an attack like that damage the face, it would leave some clear defensive wounds from when the victim fought back: scrapes or cuts on the knuckles, ripped nails, that kind of thing. I don’t see any of those, either. Did the forensic examiner mention anything like that?”
“No,” said Diana. “We assumed it was a more careful attack, so the lack didn’t stand out.”
“This is why we have a criminal psychologist on the team,” said Ostler. She looked at Trujillo. “So this attack was abnormal, that much seems obvious. What does that mean?”
“I’m not sure,” said Trujillo. “I’m still getting used to the idea that the killers we’re chasing are supernatural, and that changes literally everything. There might be a deeper psychological reason for an attack like this, or it might just be that the Withered who did it eats human flesh, and got hungry.”
I’d been so enthralled by the body that I’d missed the significance of it—all the little clues that I should have seen and didn’t, and it embarrassed me that Trujillo had seen them so easily. I’d felt even worse when Ostler asked Trujillo for advice, and hearing him admit that he was out of his depth gave me a small, almost petulant thrill. Now it was my turn.
“The first thing we know is that this is probably one of the new guys who showed up at the mortuary last night,” I said.
“Really?” asked Nathan. “You got a good look at their teeth, did you?”
“If it had happened in town before, the police examiner wouldn’t have been confused by it,” I said. “Plus, the killer hid the body in a place no local would have bothered with.”
“It was a Dumpster behind a trashy motel,” said Diana. “That’s such a common place to hide a body it’s practically a cliché.”
“Most trashy-motel Dumpsters are,” I said, “but not this one. I assume the body was found by a homeless guy?”
“It was,” said Ostler. “How did you know?”
“Because I’ve seen the Riverwalk Motel before, when we visited the homeless shelter looking for one of Cody French’s victims. The motel and the shelter are barely three blocks apart. That Dumpster probably gets picked through all the time, and a local killer as experienced as a Withered—who has to kill regularly just to survive—would know that. He would have a system in place to hide his victims, and he wouldn’t change that system out of the blue to hide a body in such a risky place.”
“The change might not be out of the blue,” said Trujillo. “An attack this violent could represent an escalation, or a reaction to something that angered him. We did just kill two Withered; they may have been his friends, and the loss pushed him over an edge.”
“But that’s why the face is important,” I said. “That’s why this body doesn’t make sense: because it doesn’t look premeditated, but it is. There’s no damage to the face or head, there’s no defensive wounds; this was not a feral assault in an alley somewhere.” I relished talking about this with people who understood me, who didn’t think I was freak. I looked at Diana. “You read the report: did the forensic guy find the wound that killed him?”
Diana scoffed. “Any of those wounds could have killed him.”
“But the examiner couldn’t tell which one, right?” She hesitated, but nodded, and I knew I was on the right track. “They couldn’t find a death blow, and they couldn’t find a point of incapacitation. No blunt trauma to the head that knocked him unconscious, no needle mark where he was injected with a sedative. The killer ate him like an animal, but not until after he was rendered helpless so carefully that we can’t find any evidence of it.”
Nathan surprised me by filling in the next detail before I could say it. “So we’re dealing with a Withered who can stun people,” he said. “Or … hypnotize them or something. Some kind of mental thing that doesn’t leave a physical mark.”
“Elijah Sexton works as a night driver for a mortuary,” I said. “He has more contact with dead people than living ones. Whatever his thing is, it doesn’t involve mind control. It’s got to be one of the new ones.”
Ostler sighed. “I was hoping Elijah’s mysterious visitors weren’t Withered. That hope is fading fast.”
“We need to do our research,” said Nathan. “Find out if this kind of attack has been reported anywhere else. If we can tap into some investigative work that’s already been done, we’ll be a lot closer to an answer.”
“That’s the kind of thing we need Kelly for,” said Diana.
“I have some police contacts of my own,” said Trujillo. “I’ll see what I can dig up.”
“No, we need you talking to Brooke,” said Ostler, shaking her head. “If we describe this attack to her it might spark a memory and give us a better sense of what we’re dealing with.”
“What we’re dealing with is a war,” said Diana. “Every Withered in the world is descending on this damned town, and it takes us months of planning just to kill one of them. Now there’s two at least, probably four, and maybe even more than that. We can’t fight this, even with police assistance.”
“You want to back off and regroup?” asked Nathan. “I second that idea wholeheartedly.”
“So do I,” I said. I was responsible for too many deaths already—all the people I couldn’t save, the friends I’d endangered. Nathan accused me of getting Kelly killed, and as much as I hated to admit it, he was right. I’d rushed us in to Mary Gardner without knowing all the details, and now Kelly was dead and Potash was in the hospital. It had been a risk worth taking, but it should have been my risk, not theirs. “We’re killing too many Withered, and too fast, and of course they’re fighting back. We organized, so they had to organize to keep up. This war is our fault.”
“They’ve been killing all along,” said Ostler, piercing me with her eyes. “Whoever ate Applebaum would have eaten somebody else in some other town, whether we were hunting Withered or not. Don’t get soft on me just because the bodies are piling up in one place.”
“He’s not saying we stop,” said Nathan. “He’s saying we should pull back and find a new plan.”
“That’s not what John’s saying at all,” said Ostler, still staring at me, and I knew she’d guessed exactly what I was planning. “He wants to run away and do this on his own: no team, no rules, just John Cleaver stalking and killing like the good old days.”
Not completely alone, I thought. I’m not leaving without Brooke.
“Forget what John wants,” said Nathan, “he’s crazy. But this is a war, and we’re on the front lines in a dangerously exposed position. Two of our team got taken out by a nurse, for crying out loud, and that was before the terrifying, mind-control cannibal showed up. We need to run away, straight back to headquarters, and figure out a new way to fight these things because this way is suicide.”
“Don’t get soft on me,” Ostler repeated, her voice as hard as steel. “What did you think you were getting into? I told you the truth when I offered you the job. I told you exactly what we were up against and what we’d be doing, and you knew the risks. You knew there were monsters, and that we were throwing ourselves directly in their path, and if you didn’t think that would put you in this kind of danger, you’re not as smart as I took you for. Of course this is a war, and of course we started it, and of course people are dying. But we’re winning, and they’re scared. If they could hurt you, Mr. Gentry, they would, and it would be your body on this slab, and—”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” asked Nathan.
“Only if you’re clever enough to see it,” snapped Ostler. “If we’re in so much danger, why is Stephen Applebaum dead and not us? Why have the only times they’ve hurt us been lucky hits in an attack we initiated? Either they don’t know who we are, or they can’t reach us, and either way, we still have the upper hand. We can do this, but not if we back off.”
“I’m willing to keep going,” said Trujillo, “but how? Even if the Wit
hered’s plan is just to wait for us to come to them, how is that not an incredibly good plan? Mary Gardner was ambushed by a special forces assassin and she still put him in the hospital. We don’t have a new Potash to spend on every Withered that comes along.”
“The attack on Mary Gardner was reckless,” said Ostler, and I felt a pang of guilt—and another pang of anger. “We thought we knew how she worked, and we were spooked by the revelation that we were being hunted. Taking her out quickly was smart, but we weren’t thinking clearly, and we weren’t ready. I take full responsibility for that.”
“So that’s the plan?” asked Nathan. “Just keep doing the same thing we always do?”
“But do it better,” said Ostler.
I could do it better alone. No one to help me, but also no one to attract attention and get in the way. But with my photo on the Internet, could I ever truly sneak up on a Withered again? My methods were simple: make friends, find their weakness, and kill them. How could I make friends in secret if they all knew my face?
“Dr. Trujillo,” said Ostler, “I want you to talk to Brooke and see what you can get out of her: tell her about the corpse, about the three men, anything that might help her to remember something new.”
“I can embalm the victim,” I offered.
Ostler looked confused. “Why would we need you to embalm the victim?”
It was a long shot anyway. “Then I’ll talk to Brooke,” I said. “She knows me, and I know what to ask about.”
“Trujillo is the expert,” said Ostler.
“Trujillo is also the only one left with police contacts,” I said. “He’s investigated serial killers before, and someone he’s worked with is bound to know something about an unsolved cannibalism case.”
“You don’t make the assignments,” said Ostler.
“Brooke doesn’t even like him,” I said. “She’ll talk to me.”
Ostler thought a moment before nodding. “Take Nathan with you.”
“She won’t like him either.”
“Hey,” said Nathan.
